Free Speech of the Left

Recall Kanye West’s remarks supporting President Donald Trump, even though he disagrees with Trump on a number of questions, and West’s further remarks saying that 400 years of slavery was a choice—and his follow-on statement that the latter remark was “just an idea.”  Just an idea that Americans who happen to be black don’t all have to think alike—they’re as free to think and speak their own minds rather than engaging in Left-approved group think as any other American.

In a clear demonstration of West’s point, we get this from a pair of denizens of the Left:

A Detroit radio station said it will ban Kanye West’s music over controversial comments the rapper made earlier this week that slavery “was a choice.”

Hosts Shay Shay and BiGG of 105.1 the Morning Bounce made the announcement Thursday on Facebook with the hashtag “Mute Kanye.”

These two went further:

We don’t want to hear Kanye’s music, we don’t want to play Kanye on our show, we don’t want to talk about Kanye anymore.  So we are taking a stand and we aren’t playing his music anymore; we just are refusing to give him a platform.

Not only that.  Because they don’t want to hear it, these two are dictating what their listeners will be permitted to hear, and they’re dictating to their listeners how they’ll be allowed to evaluate what they are permitted to hear—because Shay and BiGG think their listeners are too grindingly stupid to think for themselves, or their listeners must be required to think only Left-approved thoughts and evaluate with Left-approved paradigms.

They have to be kept locked away in the mental prison that West talked about.

And Leftists, of which Shay and BiGG are only too typical, are the keyholders.  Because there’s only way right way to think and to speak, and these personages Know Better.  George Orwell would be proud: censorship is free speech.  Or Vladimir Putin: there is no free speech, only permitted speech.

Slippery Stairs

In a Miami speech to peddle his book, ex-FBI Director James Comey had some remarks about gun control, insisting those who object to changing existing law as starting down a slippery slope are simply wrong.

It’s not a slippery slope, it’s a concrete set of stairs….  Let’s have these conversations standing there, holding the rails.

Slippery slope or concrete stairs, it’s still a downward trip away from individual liberty.  It’s instructive, too, that he continues to decline to identify his limiting principle on gun “control.”  Where would control efforts stop, does he think?  What natural limit exists?  So far, all he—and other gun control supporters—are willing to do is have us rely on the good offices of a government that would limit our access to weapons.

Until gun control supporters identify their limiting principle, there’s no debate to be had.  Of course, it may be that they’ve already identified their limit.